John Chang, M.D.

Dr. Chang graduated from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and completed an internship in internal medicine at Kaiser Foundation Hospital, San Francisco.  He completed residency training at the UCLA/WLAVA, which included training at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Veterans Administration Medical Center in West Los Angeles, Cedars Sinai Medical Center and Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center.

He is board certified in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation with a subspecialty in Sports Medicine.  Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, also known as Physiatry, is a medical specialty that seeks to restore optimal function to people with injuries to the muscles, bones, and soft tissues using the most innovative non-surgical treatments currently available.  He is a diplomate of the American Board of Pain Medicine.

His philosophy is to first do no harm then identify as accurately as possible the true origin of the patient's symptoms.  While some procedures only treat the symptoms, the most effective ones treat the origin, the true root cause.  Many chronic pain conditions probably result from the failure of the body's normal healing process, leading to incomplete healing, incompetence, and eventually, progressively worsening degeneratie changes.  This commonly occurs in the joints, tendons, and ligaments, because unlike muscle tissue, they have much less blood flowing through them.  This makes them much more susceptible to impaired healing.  Effective treatment may involve reducing inflammation to decrease pain and swelling or inducing a transient state of inflammation in order to restimulate healing.  There is no one-size-fits-all solution.  However, the goal is always the same: to treat the patient's problem effectively and to improve the patient's quality of life.

Over the years, Dr. Chang has come to believe that while traditional medicine is equipped to treat many patients, it falls short when it comes to healing and improving quality of life.  Medicine falls short especially when it comes to chronic problems that don't respond well to surgery, like some cases of neck and low back pain, tennis elbow, some meniscus tears, sprained ankles, temporomandibular syndrome, and plantar fasciitis.  This began his journey to find the most effective procedures available to treat all patients, from those who prefer to watch sporting events to those who wish to participate.